Drop in Gravity Field Over West Antarctic Linked with Ice Loss A group of German, Dutch and U.S. scientists who analyzed high-resolution satellite data from November 2009 until January 2012 found a drop in the gravity field over West Antarctica, which according to various reports has also experienced record ice loss. The researchers studied data […]

When you examine your face in the mirror, do you ever wonder how the most unique and identifying part of your body originated and developed? Writing in a new study published in Nature, a team of French and Swedish researchers offers new fossil evidence that just might explain why we have protruding noses with two […]

Researchers in China and Missouri have traced the origins of today’s domesticated cat back 5,300 years to an ancient Neolithic Chinese agricultural village located in the modern-day Shaanxi Province. Like in the old Mother Goose nursery tale “This is the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack […]

Australian scientists say they’ve found the fossil of a new species of giant platypus that walked the Earth between 5 and 15 million years ago. Up until now, the fossil record of the platypus indicated that only one species of the animal lived on Earth at any one time. The new study suggests this new […]

Last week we told you about an Australian study that suggested that the evolution of life during the Cambrian Explosion took place at five times the rate it occurs today. Now, another group of scientists from Britain, in their newly published study, weigh in on the “Big Bang of Life.” They propose that the explosion […]

Evolution during the “Big Bang of Evolution,” also known as the Cambrian Explosion, happened at five times the rate it occurs today, according to a new study, a finding that is consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Australian researchers said they’ve been able to estimate, for the first time, just how fast life evolved […]

A renowned Russian astronomer drew lots of attention after claiming there is life on Venus. Leonid Ksanfomaliti, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, analyzed photos made by Venera-13, a Soviet-era space probe that explored Venus. According to Ksanfomaliti, the photos showed objects – which looked like a disk, black flap and scorpion – that appeared […]

When you look at an African lungfish, you see an aquatic animal with an eel-like body and what appear to be small, scrawny limbs, which are actually pelvic fins. A new study suggests this creature could up-end what we thought we knew about the evolution of life on Earth as it made its way from […]

The winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced this morning in Stockholm. Daniel Shechtman of Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, won for his 1982 discovery of quasicrystals. Quasicrystals are unusual materials which have some of the properties of a regular crystal, but have a more elaborate and complex structure […]